README.md

LittleChef

With LittleChef you will be able to get started more quickly cooking with Chef, the excellent Configuration Management System.

Overview

You may think of this like a pocket Chef that doesn't need a Chef Server. Just your
local kitchen with all your cookbooks, roles data bags and nodes, which will get rsynced
to a node each time you start a Chef Solo configuration run with the bundled fix
command.

It also adds features to Chef Solo that are currently only available for Chef Server users: data bag search, and node search.

How it all works

It all starts in the kitchen, which you should keep under version control:

auth.cfg: Authentication information needed to be able to connect to the nodes

nodes/: After recipes are run on Nodes, their configuration is stored here in
JSON format. You can manually edit them or even add new ones. The name of a node
should be its FQDN

Whenever you start a Chef Solo configuration run with the local fix command, all
cookbooks, roles and databags are rsynced to the /tmp/chef-solo/ directory, together
with the /etc/chef/node.json and /etc/chef/solo.rb files, and chef-solo is executed
at the remote node.

The result is that you can configure your nodes exactly when and how you want, all
without needing a Chef Server. And all your infrastructure, including your nodes, will
be in code, revision controlled.

Data bag Search

Thus, most examples in the search wiki page are now possible, including the
following example: search(:users, "married:true AND age:35")

Environments

Chef Solo does not support Environments, but, similarly to the search case, LittleChef will automatically add a cookbook library that will let you define chef_environment
in a role or node.

Node Search

Node search is achieved by creating a "node" data bag on the fly for every run,
with the data from each node defined in nodes/, but with the attribute values being the
result from merging cookbook, node and role attributes, following the standard
Chef attribute preference rules. Some automatic attributes are also added.

Installation

Desktop support

Tested on all three major desktops:
Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows

Requirements

Python 2.6+

Fabric 1.0.1+

The best way to install LittleChef is using pip. Required packages are installed by typing:sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev for Debian and Ubuntu
oryum install python-pip python-devel for RHEL and CentOS

pip will then take care of the extra Python dependencies

Installation

You can install LittleChef directly from the PyPI:pip install littlechef

Usage

Disclaimer

Careful what you do with your nodes!:

A certain famous Chef: What do I always say? Anyone can cook.
LittleChef: Yeah. Anyone can, that doesn't mean that anyone should.

Local Setup

fix new_kitchen will create inside the current directory a few files and directories for LittleChef to be able to cook: auth.cfg, roles/, data_bags/, nodes/, cookbooks/ and site-cookbooks/. You can create and have as many kitchens as you like on your computer.

Authentication

To be able to issue commands to remote nodes, you need to enter a user and a password with sudo rights. new_kitchen will have created a file named auth.cfg. You can edit it now to enter needed authentication data. There are several possibilities:

username and password

username, password and keypair-file

A reference to an ssh-config file

The last one allows the most flexibility, as it allows you to define different usernames, passwords and/or keypair-files per hostname. LittleChef will look at ~/.ssh/config by default, but you can always specify another path in auth.cfg:

When using the Debian repository, you need to take into account that Opscode has separated Chef versions in different repos. Current default is Chef 0.10, but you can install Chef 0.9 by typing:
fix node:MYNODE deploy_chef:version=0.9

Also, if you still want to keep the chef-client around in debian, use the stop_client
option: fix node:MYNODE deploy_chef:stop_client=no

Note that if you already have Chef Solo installed on your nodes, you won't need this. Also, if you previously installed Chef using the Gem procedure, please don't use the deploy_chef package installation method, removing the gem first might be a good idea.

Cooking

Note: Don't cook outside of a kitchen!

fix -l: Show a list of all available orders

fix node:MYNODE recipe:MYRECIPE: Cook a recipe on a particular node by giving its hostname or IP. "Subrecipes" like nginx::source are supported. Note that the first time this is run for a node, a configuration file will be created at nodes/myhostname.json. You can then edit this file to override recipe attributes, for example. Further runs of this command will not overwrite this configuration file

fix node:MYNODE role:MYROLE: The same as above but role-based

fix node:MYNODE1,MYNODE2: Configures several pre-configured nodes, in order

fix node:all: It will apply all roles, recipes and attributes defined for each and every node in nodes/

fix node:all env:MYENV: Configures all nodes which have the attribute chef_environment set to MYENV

fix nodes_with_role:ROLE1: Configures all nodes which have a certain role in their run_list.

fix nodes_with_role:ROL*: Configures all nodes which have at least one role which starts with 'ROL' in their run_list.

fix nodes_with_role:ROLE1 env:MYENV: Configures all nodes in the environment MYENV which have a certain role in their run_list.

fix debug node:MYNODE: You can start all your commands with fix debug to see all Chef Solo debugging information

Once a node has a config file, the command you will be using most often is fix node:MYNODE, which allows you to repeatedly tweak the recipes and attributes for a node and rerun the configuration.